Word: essays
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...headedness in going after the song-birds with a shotgun. I don't refer to the teachers, but to those students how come to the college with an ability to write and also a need--under proven, rigorous supervision--to try their voices at something other than "the expository essay...
There are also certain peculiarities of form which can be ascribed to the specificity of Afro-American culture and which seem to bring out further the richness of Afro-American literature and thereby its enrichment of American literature. I refer to the brilliant essay writing of James Baldwin which seems to have emanated out of the ser-monesque-rapping of the Afro-American religious experience; the peculiar from of the dialect which Dunbar introduced into his works; and the particular integration of the folkloric tradition which Chestnutt used so well in his "Conjure" tales. One finds a very special...
...does Mr. Morrow equate religion with Christianity in his Essay "In the Beginning: God and Science" [Feb. 5]? The human race has many religions, many stories of creation and many "holy books," the Bible with the Book of Genesis being only one of them...
...child of five, he had witnessed the hanging of an elephant named Alice, which had gone berserk and killed a little girl. Justice, absurdly satisfied, has left Leach traumatized for life: "That little girl and Alice were the same age ... That's what gets me." In the essay "The Most Kindest Cut of All: Vasectomy," Crews humorously plays with a castration fear. "Suppose," asks his doctor, trying to dissuade him from the operation, "the woman you wanted to marry wanted children of her own and you couldn't give them to her?" "Then obviously," replies Crews...
After sluicing down quantities of vodka, after smoking too much marijuana and producing some luminous prose, it is Crews who stands naked. In the final essay, "Climbing the Tower," he contemplates the relationship between futility, violence and creativity. "I know what it means to live in an atmosphere of perpetual failure," he admits. "Inevitably, it is out of a base of failure that we try to rise again to do another thing...